I created this blog to generate a collection of useful tips, tricks and links for me and for sharing these with others. This blog will deal with various topics of Microsoft Backoffice software like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory Services and other Microsoft Infrastructure related topics. I hope this blog will grow to a collection of knowledge which will make admin’s day more comfortable and easier. Comments and revisions are welcome.

Introduction As a Tenant Admin of an Office 365 Exchange Online organization, have you ever needed to monitor who, what, and where someone is connecting to your Exchange Online resources, like accessing mailboxes on mobile devices? I ran into this request a few weeks ago, from one of my customers. After hours of research, and...

During my day to day work as a part of support organization, I work with and help troubleshoot mailbox migrations very often. One type of migrations that we see quite often is IMAP migrations. I wanted to put together an overview of IMAP migration good practices as well as troubleshooting tips related to IMAP migrations....

Important: This article contains preliminary information that may be changed prior to final commercial release of the software described herein.

Building Block Architecture

In Exchange Server 2016, there is a single building block that provides the client access services and the high availability architecture necessary for any enterprise messaging environment.

Figure 1: Building Block Architecture

In our continuing quest to improve the product’s capabilities and simplify the architecture and its deployment, we have removed the Client Access server (CAS) role and added the client access services to the Mailbox role. Even without the CAS role, the system maintains loose coupling in terms of functionality, versioning, user partitioning and geographical affinity.

The Mailbox server role now:

Houses the logic to route protocol requests to the correct destination endpoint.

Hosts all of the components and/or protocols that process, render and store the data.

No clients connect directly to the back-end endpoints on the Mailbox server; instead, clients connect client access services and are routed (via local or remote proxy) to the Mailbox server that hosts the active database that contains the user’s mailbox.

Mailbox servers can be added to a Database Availability Group (DAG), thereby forming a high availability unit that can be deployed in one or more datacenters. DAGs in Exchange Server 2016 do have a few specific enhancements:

DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpAddresses is no longer required when creating a DAG. By default, the failover cluster will be created without an administrative access point, as this is the recommended best practice.

Replay Lag Manager is enabled by default.

Lagged database copy play down can be delayed based on disk latency, thereby ensuring active users are not impacted.

Database failovers times are reduced by 33% when compared to Exchange Server 2013.

Removal of the separate CAS role does not affect how communication occurs between servers. Communication between servers still occurs at the protocol layer, effectively ensuring that every server is an island. For a given mailbox’s connectivity, the protocol being used is always served by the protocol instance that is local to the active database copy.

Figure 2: Inter-server communication in Exchange 2016

The load balancer configuration is also not affected by this architectural change. From a protocol perspective, the following will happen:

A client resolves the namespace to a load balanced virtual IP address.

The load balancer assigns the session to a Mailbox server in the load balanced pool.

The Mailbox server authenticates the request and performs a service discovery by accessing Active Directory to retrieve the following information:

Mailbox version (for this discussion, we will assume an Exchange 2016 mailbox)

The Mailbox server makes the decision to proxy the request or redirect the request to another Mailbox server in the infrastructure (within the same forest).

The Mailbox server queries an Active Manager instance that is responsible for the database to determine which Mailbox server is hosting the active copy.

The Mailbox server proxies the request to the Mailbox server hosting the active copy.

The protocol used in step 6 depends on the protocol used to connect to client access services. If the client request uses HTTP, then the protocol used between the servers is HTTP (secured via SSL using a self-signed certificate). If the protocol used by the client is IMAP or POP, then the protocol used between the servers is IMAP or POP.

Telephony requests are unique. Instead of proxying the request at step 6, the Mailbox server will redirect the request to the Mailbox server hosting the active copy of the user’s database, as the telephony devices support redirection and need to establish their SIP and RTP sessions directly with the Unified Messaging services on the Mailbox server.

Figure 3: Client Protocol Connectivity

And yes, the Edge Transport server role will ship in Exchange Server 2016 (and at RTM, to boot!). All the capabilities and features you had in the Edge Transport server role in Exchange Server 2013, remain in Exchange Server 2016.

Why did we remove the Client Access server role?

The Exchange Server 2016 architecture evolves the building block architecture that has been refined over the course of the last several releases. With this architecture, all servers in the Exchange environment (excluding Edge Transport) are exactly the same—the same hardware, the same configuration, and so forth. This uniformity simplifies ordering the hardware, as well as performing maintenance and management of the servers.

As with Exchange 2010 and in Exchange 2013, we continue to recommend role co-location as a best practice. From a cost perspective, the overall goal is to ensure that the architecture is balanced for CPU and disk. Having separate server roles can result in long-term cost disadvantages as you may purchase more CPU, disk, and memory resources than you will actually use. For example, consider a server that hosts only the Client Access server role. Many servers enable you to add a given number of disks in a very economical fashion—when you are deploying and using that number of disks, the cost is essentially zero. But if you deploy a server role that uses far less than the given number of disks, you’re paying for a disk controller that is either under-used or not used at all.

This architecture is designed to enable you to have fewer physical Exchange servers in your environment. Fewer physical servers mean lower costs for a variety of reasons:

Operational costs are almost always higher than the capital costs. It costs more to manage a server over its lifetime than it does to purchase it.

You purchase fewer Exchange server licenses. This architecture only requires a license for one Exchange server and one operating system, while breaking out the roles required multiple Exchange server licenses and multiple operating system licenses.

Deploying fewer servers has a trickle-down effect across the rest of the infrastructure. For example, deploying fewer physical servers may reduce the total rack and floor space required for the Exchange infrastructure, which in turn reduces power and cooling costs.

This architecture ultimately distributes the load across a greater number of servers than deploying single-role servers because all Mailbox servers also handle client access because:

You’re distributing the load across a greater number of physical machines, which increases scalability. During a failure event, the load on the remaining servers only increases incrementally, which ensures the other functions the server is performing aren’t adversely affected.

The solution can survive a greater number of Client Access role (or service) failures and still provide service, which increases resiliency.

Exchange Server 2016 also includes a number of architectural improvements, beyond the server role consolidation, including search enhancements, document collaboration improvements, and more.

Search Improvements

One of the challenging areas for on-premises environment was the amount of data that was replicated with each database copy in previous releases. In Exchange Server 2016, we have reduced bandwidth requirements between the active copy and a passive copy by 40%. This was accomplished by enabling the local search instance to read data from its local database copy. As a result of this change, passive search instances no longer need to coordinate with their active counterparts in order to perform index updates.

Another area of investment in search has been around decreasing the length of time to return search results, especially in online mode clients like OWA. This is accomplished by performing multiple asynchronous disk reads prior to the user completing the search term, which populates the cache with the relevant information, providing sub-second search query latency for online mode clients.

Document Collaboration

In previous releases of Exchange, OWA included document preview for Office and PDF documents, reducing the need to have a full fidelity client. SharePoint had a similar feature, however it used the Office Web Apps Server to accomplish this capability. Within Office 365, we also leverage Office Web Apps Server to provide this capability, ensuring uniform document preview and editing capability across the suite.

In Exchange Server 2016, we leverage Office Web Apps Server to provide the rich document preview and editing capabilities for OWA. While this was a necessary change to ensure a homogenous experience across the Office Server suite, this does introduce additional complexity for environments that don’t have Office Web Apps Server.

The next generation of Office Web Apps Server will not be supported for co-location with Exchange. Therefore, you must deploy a separate server farm infrastructure. This infrastructure will require unique namespaces, and will require session affinity to be maintained at the load balancer.

While Exchange supports an unbound namespace model, the Office Web Apps Server will require a bound namespace for each site resilient datacenter pair. However, unlike the bound namespace model within Exchange, Office Web Apps Server will not require any namespace changes during a datacenter activation.

Figure 4: Office Web Apps Server Connectivity

Extensibility

Office 365 introduced the REST APIs (Mail, Calendar, and Contact APIs), and now these APIs are available in Exchange Server 2016. The REST APIs simplify programming against Exchange by providing a familiar syntax that is designed with openness (e.g., open standards support JSON, OAUTH, ODATA) and flexibility (e.g., granular, tightly scoped permission to access user data). These APIs allow developers to connect from any platform, whether it be web, PC, or mobile. SDKs exist for.NET, iOS, Android, NodeJS, Ruby, Python, Cordova, and CORS for use in single page JavaScript web apps.

What about Exchange Web Services (EWS)? All existing applications that leverage EWS will continue to work with Exchange Server 2016. We are, however, focusing new platform investments on the REST APIs and the apps for Office extensibility model. We expect to make significantly fewer investments in EWS so that we can focus our resources on investing in a single modern API that will, over time, enable most of the scenarios that our partners currently use EWS.

Outlook Connectivity

Introduced in Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1, MAPI/HTTP is the new standard in connectivity for Outlook. In Exchange Server 2016, MAPI/HTTP is enabled by default. In addition, Exchange Server 2016 introduces per-user control over this connectivity model, as well as, the ability to control whether the protocol (and Outlook Anywhere) is advertised to external clients.

Coexistence with Exchange Server 2013

In Exchange Server 2013, the Client Access server role is simply an intelligent proxy that performs no processing/rendering of the content. That architectural tenet paid off in terms of forward coexistence. When you introduce Exchange Server 2016, you do not need to move the namespace. That’s right, the Exchange Server 2013 Client Access infrastructure can proxy the mailbox requests to the Exchange 2016 servers hosting the active database copy! For the first time ever, you get to decide when you move the namespace over to the new version. And not only that, you can even have load balancer pools contain a mix of Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2016. This means you can do a one-for-one swap – as you add Exchange 2016 servers, you can remove Exchange 2013 servers.

The Preferred Architecture

During my session at Microsoft Ignite, I revealed Microsoft’s preferred architecture (PA) for Exchange Server 2016. The PA is the Exchange Engineering Team’s best practice recommendation for what we believe is the optimum deployment architecture for Exchange 2016, and one that is very similar to what we deploy in Office 365.

While Exchange 2016 offers a wide variety of architectural choices for on-premises deployments, this architecture is our most scrutinized one ever. While there are other supported deployment architectures, they are not recommended.

The Exchange 2016 PA is very similar to the Exchange 2013 PA. A symmetrical DAG is deployed across a datacenter pair with active database copies distributed across all servers in the DAG. Database copies are deployed on JBOD storage, with four copies per-disk. One of the copies is a lagged database copy. Clients connect to a unified namespace that is equally distributed across the datacenters in the site resilient pair.

However, the Exchange 2016 PA differs in the following ways:

Exchange’s unbound namespace model is load balanced across the datacenters in a layer 7 configuration that does not leverage session affinity.

An Office Web Apps Server farm is deployed in each datacenter, with each farm having a unique namespace (bound model). Session affinity is managed by the load balancer.

The DAG is deployed without an administrative access point.

The commodity dual-socket server hardware platform contains 20-24 cores and up to 196GB of memory, and a battery-backed write cache controller.

All data volumes are formatted with ReFS.

As we get closer to release, we’ll publish a complete Exchange 2016 Preferred Architecture article.

Summary

Exchange Server 2016 continues in the investments introduced in previous versions of Exchange by reducing the server role architecture complexity, aligning with the Preferred Architecture and Office 365 design principles, and improving coexistence with Exchange Server 2013.

These changes simplify your Exchange deployment, without decreasing the availability or the resiliency of the deployment. And in some scenarios, when compared to previous generations, the PA increases availability and resiliency of your deployment.